Re: [-empyre-] Is Modernity our Antiquity? fugue

[Simon Taylor <swht@clear.net.nz>]

Dear Empyreans,
the following I pursued for my own interest: I apologise if there's nothing
in it.

Roger Beurgel in quotes:

“It is fairly obvious that modernity, or modernity’s fate, exerts a profound
influence on contemporary artists.”

How is modernity tied to its fate that, either the thing itself or the myth,
exerts a pull – as if equally and interchangeably? And if there isn’t any
thing in itself there? Only the mythic Fate, then isn’t this a description
of tragedy? Is a degree of that influence to do with the desire not just to
reinstaurate the determinism or fatalism of modernity on its certain path
but to redeem it?

“Part of that attraction may stem from the fact that no one really knows if
modernity is dead or alive.”

Which suggests exactly the spectral/corp(u)s/e mode modernity was so good at
advancing: and pomo was so good at extracting – half-life apparitions and
death-drive amortisations.

“It seems to be in ruins after the totalitarian catastrophes of the 20th
century (the very same catastrophes to which it somehow gave rise).”

Surely, that ‘somehow’, tenuously holding on, like spectral rider to
ghoulish horse, confirms that the modernity described here is in the grand
European tragic style – or pomo pastiche thereof. The taste for setting such
great store by aesthetics (however deeply internally politicised or
outwardly conceptual and dematerialised), that ‘totalitarian catastrophes’
ensue from them, is modernist at the fascist end of the spectrum.

“It seems utterly compromised by the brutally partial application of its
universal demands (liberté, égalité, fraternité) or by the simple fact that
modernity and coloniality went, and probably still go, hand in hand.”

As a colonial antipode – foot in hand, sometimes in mouth – I’ve thought a
little about colonialism’s place in respect of modernity. My view, from NZ,
of modernity is only historically, not ‘utterly,’ ‘compromised’ by the
cultural marginalisation that goes hand-in-hand with modernity’s centralist
concerns. But this issue brings us round to whether modernity has a
political armature in praxis, a Realpolitik, such that it could be ‘brutally
partial’ in the application of demands that are by no means ‘universal’ nor
endemic to modernity, as an era (or a constellation, an infirmament, of
historically informed assumptions and happenstance).

The secular nation-state, to my mind, better expresses the political ideas
and ideals of the modern era, and of modernity, than the Colonial Empire.
The failure of the former – in its current crisis or decadence – offers
perhaps a clearer index to the vivacity or morbidity of a political
modernity.

“Still, people’s imaginations are full of modernity’s visions and forms (and
I mean not only Bauhaus but also arch-modernist mind-sets transformed into
contemporary catchwords like “identity” or “culture”).”

There is something about this ‘transformation’ (of ‘arch-modernist mindsets
’) that merits discussion. I think it was Brett, forgive me if I’m wrong,
who said that postmodernism is built on the foundations of modernism.
Christine has poked a little, deservedly, at the idea of Hegelian synthesis,
in the n-state. In both views there inheres the idea of transformation – a
redemption even of modernist assumptions. I think this archaeological
impulse, this restorative ‘moral’ and critical project – such, indeed, that
the question heading this discussion can be asked – may be promoted by
precisely the kind of spectacular mise-en-scene we see in Roger Beurgel’s
statement on modernity.

“In short, it seems that we are both outside and inside modernity, both
repelled by its deadly violence and seduced by its most immodest aspiration
or potential: that there might, after all, be a common planetary horizon for
all the living and the dead."

Pa Ubu: “Hornstrumpet! We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything
unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing
that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.”

Finally, a brief word regarding the n-state, an idea with its own
fascination; and I’d like to know more about its provenance; since, as well
as zipping up a certain bodybag – synthetic teeth mesh – it also iterates
management/bureaucratic themes of ‘technological progress and
infrastructural improvements’. (By way of contrast, inspired by a Polish
grandmother on a European train, ’82, I chanced on the related idea of
‘n-set’ – a play on ‘NZ’ and also an acronym. The grandmother said that all
her countrymen were doing in those days was watching satellite TV and making
babies – “like Africa!” she said.
(N-SET became a script-scenario dealing with a covert (insurgence) operation
starting in Poland to postmodernise via media’s softsell immersion the East
and West and foment political revolution: to postmediatise consciousness.
N-SET stands for ‘non-specified enemy territory’ – carrying forward its
scenario through random acts of state-sponsored terror, according to the
view that the civilian population as a whole is the only object on which a
postmodern war can be waged.)

Simon Taylor